It's not done yet, but it's coming. It's like a series of vignettes. The order's wrong right now.

--

He writes in the Unix terminal. It's not about the aesthetic, he tells himself. Just easier to focus.

dawsons-mbp:~ dhighland$ touch wip.txt

"emacs would sound cooler," he thinks. nano is way easier to use.

dawsons-mbp:~ dhighland$ nano wip.txt

He takes pleasure in the Save command. ^O: WriteOut. He makes use of it often, writing out more than he writes down. Irony as procrastination.

^X: Exit.

dawsons-mbp:~ dhighland$ open wip.txt

Now— now, focus. Monospace manuscript emerging in time, interrupted by entrances, conversations drifting. That’s what he gets for writing in public. Somewhere a door slammed.

It occurs to him that his university has a program in Creative Writing. But then, two weeks ago he’d been ready to declare Computer Science.

He notes the time. Comparison: 15 lines. Hard work, this writing. Especially as he is now, in a cafe in a library, surrounded by friends.

—

He writes about her in the second degree. How he wishes he could write about anything else. How he distracts himself as much as he can but it’s still not enough. How even if he thought she wanted to, he couldn’t.

He knows it annoys them, how he can’t just— stop. Not as much as it annoys him.

He texts her anyway.

—

He worries that, soon, he’ll run out of stories. Like that time he tried standup: seventeen years of the occasional observation, jotted down and refined into laughter. Gone in two sets.

—

He’s never written from any perspective but his own. A failure of empathy, perhaps. Or simple fear of failure.

He recalls the scenes written in high school. “Spaces,” it was called. A nominally Asian lead; autobiographical nonetheless.